Philosophical Apprentice comments.

The framing of this latest David Brooks essay, in which he ponders ‘the decline of the American psyche’ what ever that might be? What are the credentials that Brooks offers The Reader? His long apprenticeship to Wm. F. Buckley Jr. : Depth Psychology and Buckley were antithetical.

If I were asked to trace the decline of the American psyche, I suppose I would go to a set of cultural changes that started directly after World War II and built over the next few decades, when writers as diverse as Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch and Tom Wolfe noticed the emergence of what came to be known as the therapeutic culture.

Philip Rieff published his book the Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud, Harper & Row in 1966.

Old Master

FRED BAUMANN

June 1, 2006

Cultural critic Phillip Rieff has been a man of few but powerful words. Now, at age 84, he has published the first volume of a new trilogy.

Philip Rieff is what we might call an obscure famous man. Among intellectuals of
a certain kind and generation he is the master who in 1965 published The Triumph
of The Therapeutic: The Uses of Faith After Freud, a pioneering work that charted
the rise of the therapeutic ethos in Western culture (and whose basic thesis was
borrowed some years later by the late Christopher Lasch for The Culture of
Narcissism). He is also famous to University of Pennsylvania denizens of a certain
period, for he was Benjamin Franklin Professor of Sociology there for many years
until his retirement in 1992. And for those who like to follow more personal
matters, he is famous for having married Susan Sontag and fathered the journalist
David Rieff.

…

Old Master

Those of ‘us’ who came of age trying to master the Freudian patois, Rieff’s book was another hurdle.

Christopher Lasch published his book ’The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations’ in 1979. And Tom Wolfe of ‘The ‘Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.”

The Book of Self-Love

By Lee Siegel

Feb. 5, 2010

…

This would all sound familiar to Christopher Lasch. Just over 30 years ago, in “The Culture of Narcissism,” Lasch, a historian at the University of Rochester, took what was still mainly a narrowly clinical term and used it to diagnose a pathology that seemed to have spread to all corners of American life. In Lasch’s definition (drawn from Freud), the narcissist, driven by repressed rage and self-hatred, escapes into a grandiose self-conception, using other people as instruments of gratification even while craving their love and approval. Lasch saw the echo of such qualities in “the fascination with fame and celebrity, the fear of competition, the inability to suspend disbelief, the shallowness and transitory quality of personal relations, the horror of death.” “The happy hooker,” Lasch wrote, “stands in place of Horatio Alger as the prototype of personal success.”

Not all reviewers cottoned to Lasch’s relentlessly grim tone, but Time magazine described him as a “biblical prophet,” and the broader public embraced his jeremiad. Appearing at a time of inflation and recession, oil shortages, soaring crime rates and faltering cities, Lasch’s book leapt onto the best-seller list, making him famous. Jimmy Carter was so taken with Lasch’s ideas that he invited the academic author to advise him on the famous “malaise” speech of July 1979.

…

Lasch wasn’t the first to comment on our rising self-absorption. Three years earlier, Tom Wolfe had written an epoch-anointing cover story in New York magazine called “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” But where Wolfe celebrated narcissism as a millenarian outburst of vitality — “the greatest age of individualism in American history,” as he put it with winking enthusiasm — Lasch saw a decadent defiance of nature and kinship. In “The Culture of Narcissism,” he asked a simple question that cut deeper than Wolfe’s provocation: How had the radical changes in American economic and social arrangements since the 19th century affected the individual? Armed with Marx’s conviction that economic forces shape character and with Freud’s insight into the bourgeois mind, he answered with a sulfurous indictment of contemporary American life. “Long-term social changes,” Lasch wrote, have “created a scarcity of jobs, devalued the wisdom of the ages and brought all forms of authority (including the authority of experience) into disrepute.”

Mr. Brooks demonstrates that his inclusion of Tom Wolfe, before he became an American Silver Fork Novelist. Mr. Brookes continues his exercise in self-serving hyperbole.

In earlier cultural epochs, many people derived their self-worth from their relationship with God, or from their ability to be a winner in the commercial marketplace. But in a therapeutic culture people’s sense of self-worth depends on their subjective feelings about themselves. Do I feel good about myself? Do I like me?

From the start, many writers noticed that this ethos often turned people into fragile narcissists. It cut them off from moral traditions and the normal sources of meaning and identity. It pushed them in on themselves, made them self-absorbed, craving public affirmation so they could feel good about themselves. As Lasch wrote in his 1979 book, “The Culture of Narcissism,” such people are plagued by an insecurity that can be “overcome only by seeing his ‘grandiose self’ reflected in the attentions of others.”

Lasch continued: “Plagued by anxiety, depression, vague discontents, a sense of inner emptiness, the ‘psychological man’ of the 20th century seeks neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence but peace of mind, under conditions that increasingly militate against it.”

Mr. Brooks’ change of decade to the near present, or the past present?

Fast forward a few decades, and the sense of lostness and insecurity, which Lasch and many others had seen in nascent form, had transmogrified into a roaring epidemic of psychic pain. By, say, 2010, it began to be clear that we were in the middle of a mental health crisis, with rising depression and suicide rates, an epidemic of hopelessness and despair among the young.

…

Before long, safetyism was on the march. This is the assumption that people are so fragile they need to be protected from social harm.

…

This was accompanied by what you might call the elephantiasis of trauma.

…

A mega-best-selling book about trauma, “The Body Keeps the Score,” by Bessel van der Kolk, became the defining cultural artifact of the era.

…

Before long, safetyism was on the march. This is the assumption that people are so fragile they need to be protected from social harm.

…

For many people, trauma became their source of identity. People began defining themselves by the way they had been hurt.

…

Apparently, every national phenomenon has to turn into a culture war, and that’s what happened to the psychological crisis. In one camp, there were the coddlers.

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Editor: Magically Political Hysterics Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt appear:

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt described the first bad idea in “The Coddling of the American Mind.” It was the notion that “what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” inducing people to look at the wounds in their past and feel debilitated, not stronger.

…

The traumatized person is cast as a passive victim unable to control his own life.

Editor: more Pop Psychology, or it it just self-serving political kitsch?

But overprotective parenting and overprotective school administration don’t produce more resilient children; they produce less resilient ones.

…

Editor: Jordan Peterson and Josh Hawley appear as part of ‘an army of masculinist influencers’.

The counterreaction to the coddlers came from what you might call the anti-fragile coalition. This was led by Jordan Peterson and thousands of his lesser imitators — from Senator Josh Hawley to an army of masculinist influencers.

Editor: the cast of characters grows with nearly every paragraph. A self-protective reductionism is not just necessary but demanded.

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“Take the lamentations about atrophying manhood and falling sperm counts. Call it what you want, but the core idea is always shaped like trauma.

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Editor: The Reader has 541 more words, of this diatribe, to reach before it’s end… my patience has reached its end! Neo-Conservatives always alienate their readership, via their insufferable arrogance, Mr. Brooks follows that self-destructive imperative to the letter.

Philosophical Apprentice